New PeerTube version! (…so stuff will go wrong for a bit)

You may be wondering to yourself, “kuoushi, why do you need to make a full-blown news post for a new version of your self-hosted video archive stuff?” Well, let me tell you. The new version of PeerTube fixes an issue that we were apparently having with audio desync in basically every single video that I didn’t notice because it only affected Chromium and Webkit browsers (which is the entire rest of the internet aside from Firefox users which explains how I didn’t notice it earlier on). This is good news, right? It is.

The bad news, however, is that to fix it in all of my archives, I have to re-transcode every single video on my archive currently. That is going to take a while, and some archives will go up or down until that process completes. The positive, though, aside from everything being fixed, is that after that’s all done, I’ll go back to working on the archive and getting the rest of the missing streams off of YouTube and into there.

Basically, if you click an archive and it doesn’t play, that’s probably what’s going on now.

Back on the topic of games, I’ve been slowly building out things on the site and deciding where things go. Things like The Bargain Bin stuff I’ve been working on. I’ve tossed all the complete archives for those streams into that category, and I’m also now including my Steam reviews of each game there. In the same vein, I’ve also resurrected the Steam Group’s Curator page so that I can put all of this stuff in there too. Like and subscribe and all that other stuff people say. Honestly, it’s just amusing for me to use all these things, even if no one pays much attention to them.

On the other good side of things, we’ve been finishing games! First up after we finished Gunman Chronicles, we moved on to a little free JRPG-inspired game by Scumhead known as Franzen. Longer than expected, and not without its rubbing points, but still a solid experience overall. You can read more from the review on the Complete Archive page, but I had fun per the usual.

We also (barely) finished playing through Ilum. It is an experience, I’ll say that. Whether it’s a good experience or not, well, that’s up to you. Check the review out for that one on the Complete Archive page so you can see more about my thoughts on it. It’s probably more fun to watch someone else suffer through, though. And, what an ending!

I guess I’ve also been making highlights again, but haven’t decided how I want to include them on the site just yet. For now, they’re only on Twitch.

But anyway, that’s all I’ve got for today. We’re currently going through Axe Cop, which is a lot of dumb fun so far. Tune in late nights on weekends to catch more of that, but we’re likely in for a pretty long haul on that one. Maybe not as long as False Skies, but still a full-length JRPG kind of game.

Thanks for sticking around.

The Bargain Bin Streams Continue

If you haven’t been keeping up with modern era kuoushi streams, you won’t have noticed that I have been streaming a bunch of games with around 100 reviews or less on Steam. There are so many games released every year that some are absolutely going to fall through the cracks and get completely ignored by the world at large. Some are bound to be hidden gems, but most are just going to be unpolished in some are all aspects of things involved in gamedev. That’s just the way it goes. Luckily, they’re not expensive and can generally be streamed by me. Good for me, at least.

Most recently, we played through Pyramis and Digitizer. Both are largely made by solo devs, so that just means we’re going to get some goofy fun, right? Well, anyway. Pyramis was kind of fun except that every time it had a chance to do something cool, it decided against it. You can find out more about my thoughts from my Steam review over here, but at suffice to say, at least the streams were fun? Well, I think they were, anyway.

Digitizer, on the other hand, was legitimately a fun thing for me to play. It did devolve into a lot of just driving around and being stupid, but that’s where I shine. Right? It’s an open-world game made by someone whose first language isn’t English, fully voice acted. It’s hard to describe it, but I get a robot wife at one point. If you want to know my real thoughts about it just go to the Steam Review, but the end note here is that I’m now the only person in the world aside from one other person (maybe the dev) who has played through a lot of the game’s content. And now, you can experience it as well, without having to play! Good for you. Oh, and if you liked Digitizer, the same dev is making a new game that only got announced last month called Noga. Go wishlist it on Steam.

I did also go back and finish my lingering Gunman Chronicles streams from 2016, like I said I would eventually. So that game is closed out now, too. I always liked that game back when it actually came out, so it’s nice to finally re-unite with my robot wife in that game as well. Wait, another robot wife? Shit. I might be outing myself here.

Complete Archives

Gunman Chronicles
Pyramis
Digitizer

Check out the complete archives if you just want to turn them on and brain off while the dulcet tones of kuoushi’s stream of consciousness bring you safely to the ends of these games.

Site News

Unrelated to the above, or vaguely related since it’s all about my site or whatever, but I have been also working on the site itself and some background bot things over the past few days that I’m pleased is now all working. You might notice that the front page of kuoushi.com no longer has a Twitch embed, and it’s now something called PeerTube with a special chat box. That’s right, chat is back, and it works just as you’d expect. You can choose any name you want on it and be anonymous, or you can even make an account on kuoushi.com, then tie your kuoushi.com account to the chat channel so you don’t have to worry about always typing in your name and things. It’s all pretty neat and works kind of (?) seamlessly. This chat is also relayed back to Discord and Twitch, so kuoushi won’t be missing any of your messages on stream.

Speaking of the chat relay, I’ve basically ripped that out of my bot and put it into a much more stable piece of software called Matterbridge. It may not be very interesting to most people, but it does seem to just work. So if ever my bot goes down, the relay will almost always be up with very little chance of it crashing anymore. That’s nice for me, at least. I think it’s neat.

Some future stuff that I plan on getting going at some point is allowing for the stream embed to swap between PeerTube and Twitch, and also allow for friend streams to be embedded there as well like Highwang, Gerk, or Teepers. They won’t have a PeerTube channel most likely, but the site will still hopefully be able to announce that they’re streaming in the future. Oh, and me as well. I want things to load automatically like they used to back in the day, so I have some work cut out for me there. Eventually, just like everything else.

Site’s in a nice place, though. I’m happy with where it’s at again. PeerTube transfer has stalled out a bit, but it’ll pick back up again eventually.

And I think that’s the main bit of news I have for now.

What game are we playing next?

I don’t have polls on the site anymore, but I’m likely going to choose from one of the following games. The others may or may not follow.

Comedy Option
Daikatana

Bargain Bin Options
Curse: The Eye of Isis
Surfasarus
Franzen
Ilum

Throw stuff at me in the comments if you care one way or the other, but I’ll figure out how well they stream then pick one for maybe next weekend.

That’s it! Thanks for sticking around and see you all next time.

We completing games around here

How many variations of that particular phrase am I going to use for a title? I don’t know, maybe one. Maybe more. I’m not going back to check. Too busy totally streaming all the time, more than once a month. Wait, shit.

Anyway, on topic, we did beat False Skies last month. It’s not a 100% clear or anything, but I did do quite a lot of the available content in the game. There’s still new game+ and maybe 20 more hours of game to play if I want to, but I’ll leave that for my own private playing time that I totally do. Why? Because I streamed it for almost 44 hours. It’s a good game, that’s about all I’ll say here. You can read my review on Steam (mark it as helpful!) or listen to the end of the last stream to get my thoughts a bit more directly. Make sure you check out the complete archive for the game if you haven’t started watching it yet. It’s good.

And wait, what’s this? Baw gawd it’s Deadpool with a metal chair because apparently I went back to it and finished it off! Enough wrestling talk. No one does that anymore. But yeah, the last time I streamed this game was back in 2016, the world was different back then. I still streamed vaguely regularly. That was the main difference. But then life happened, and all of a sudden I ended up with a Steam Deck this year so I installed Deadpool on that and slowly worked my way back to recreating my save file as exactly as possible over a couple of weeks since I don’t have a lot of time, and then I streamed it and beat it in an hour and a half and here we are. It’s a game that exists, that much is true. Fun enough for what it is with a decent amount of Deadpool antics. Too bad you can’t buy it anymore. Here’s my complete archive if you wanted to start from the beginning, and then here’s just the last episode if you totally remember all of the streams from 2016 and just want to end the story.

The PeerTube archive transfer is also coming along. I made it back almost all the way through 2012, but it’s going to be slow going because those early years are the most full of streams. Like Suikoden II which I just finished making available through PeerTube, with its near 46 hours of gameplay (even though it’s missing a stream). It actually beats out False Skies for overall duration which is pretty impressive (for both of those games). But I’ll keep plugging along here and soon the archive will be complete again. Then maybe I’ll add call-ins. Maybe.

So there’s your update for the month. I’m still here. Things are always happening, just not always super visible.

Thanks for sticking around!

Slow News Year

So while I may not have been streaming too much lately due to overwhelming work and potentially life, I have still been working on things like transferring all of my archive over to my PeerTube instance. I’m still quite fond of PeerTube and everything that it brings. One of those things I’ve figured out is that I can directly embed playlists into my site.

So, while I’ve been transferring archives (we’ve made it back into 2013!), I’ve also been creating some complete archives that can just play through the entirety of a given game without needing too much user interaction or page reloads on the viewer’s part. They’re pretty neat, and honestly probably the better way to consume that Kuolity Kontent™ that you so crave. There’s also the added bonus of me getting to see how long I spent on each game in total, which is Fun™.

Unsure how long it will take to get everything over to PeerTube, but it’ll be worth it once it’s all there. Maybe we’ll even get a cool new stream embed on the site one of these days that uses PeerTube. Who knows. I have a lot of ideas and no real follow through. Such is life.

See you guys in future streams.

Kuoushi in 2023, a Year That Existed

All in all, a good year for streams and Kuontent™ in general

Enjoy another Twitch recap.

I know things have been rather silent the past few weeks or so, but that’s mostly because I’ve been extraordinarily busy with work even on the weekends. Sucks, but it is what it is. Hoping to get back to streaming and finishing off False Skies soon enough.

But all that aside, it’s honestly been a good year for kuoushi streams. The best on the books since 2019, and I’m sure those of you out there still following along at home will agree. We finished up Homefront: The Revolution earlier in the year, killing all the Norks in existence because why not. All’s fair when it comes to defeating invaders or something. Then we powered through a bunch of smaller games like the best Jurassic Park game ever, Trespasser, followed by F.E.A.R. and all of its expansions to finish off that franchise, the first Turok remake for more dinosaurs, and we even visited a space station in Prey (2017).

After that we launched into a small series that I’ve taken to calling The Bargain Bin, which targets games with something like 100 reviews or so in Steam. So not the biggest games ever, but still a lot of fun to just give them their time.

We also played Dino Crisis 2 which was certainly a time. I might just like dinosaurs. We even played a big ol’ Doom TC WAD known as Ashes: Afterglow which was damn solid. Way bigger than I expected, and only a few little stumbling blocks. We even played that first Call of Juarez game to wrap up that series of games as well. And finally, as mentioned in the beginning of the post, we started up a small JRPG known as False Skies. It’s big. It’s neat. It has a lot of systems. And let’s just say I like it so far, and can’t wait to finish it.

And none of the above is mentioning that my archives of streams are now as complete as they can be. Every single stream that I have a video archive for on my hard drives is now available from the kuoushi archive. Most are available through YouTube at the moment, but I’ve also started getting my archives entirely self-hosted on my own PeerTube instance to cut YouTube out entirely. It’s honestly been going really well, but I still need to get more of the old streams uploaded there instead of YouTube. This mostly helps when YouTube would mute things or otherwise say my streams are unsavory. I’m also able to stream through PeerTube as well, plus I’m looking into getting that to be the main embed on the site here with a chat that doesn’t require logging in, similar to how the old site functioned. Still figuring that all out with my limited time, though.

All in all, a good year for streams and Kuontent™ in general, even if I mostly only streamed Friday and Saturday nights when I had time. I’m hoping to free up more time next year to stream here and there, though we’ll see how that goes.

Oh, and I’m also in the top 10% of Homefront: The Revolution streamers again this year.

I’ll see you guys in 2024.

Thanks for hanging around as always.

Keeping up with posts on a blog? Who does that?

Not me, that’s for sure.

Been a couple of weeks since I streamed something, so now that I have, it’s time for another blog post that will meet all of your wildest desires (for kuoushi™ content).

The most recent thing to talk about is how we’ve begun the current endgame for the Call of Juarez series. Playing things in reverse is normal, and here I am starting up the very first in the Call of Juarez series. What’s that, you say? There was another game I’m forgetting about? Well too fucking bad. It’s not sold anymore so I’m not going out of my way to get it and play it. This is it. No more Call of Juarez after I finish playing this first game, unless of course they release another. I’m sure all of the dozens of Call of Juarez fans will fault me for this and stop watching my streams in droves. Whatever the case, hey come watch the Call of Juarez streams live or check them out as they get posted to the archive.

The other thing of note is that I’ve kind of sort of taken up a new streaming hobby where I’ll find games that have around 100 or less reviews on Steam, and then I’ll stream them. There likely won’t be many diamonds in the rough, but I do expect to have some experiences. On that note, we’ve done four such games so far! I’m calling the series The Bargain Bin to myself, and if you want to keep up with whenever I stream those games, just check out the tag here. That Which Gives Chase and The Warriorlock in particular were a lot of fun to me. Katana Soul and Powernaut Vangardt were just too hard on my old man reflexes, unfortunately. I might give the latter another try now that I know how it works though.

What’s that? More has happened since the last post? You’re right. I’ve actually been busy. On top of the above, I also finished playthroughs of Dino Crisis 2 and the Doom total conversion mod known as Ashes: Afterglow, which is fantastic.

We’ll say that’s it for now (aside from the PeerTube archive still moving backwards fairly swimmingly into the year 2015), so hope you’ve all enjoyed this recap of the past few months of totally good times.

Thanks as always.

Prey is as Prey does

It’s done, is all I’m saying. We arrived on Talos 1 with naught but uh, naught. And we left with even less. I mean, honestly it was a fun game with a lot of different options in how you play it. I didn’t play it the right way, and I can tell you why. One, I didn’t even know how to zoom in until the very last stream. That’s pretty much it. Also I never used any of the different powers available. Just shooty shooted my way through. But hey, it was a viable way to play and that’s what makes Prey a good game. It let me be an idiot and didn’t stop me from doing so. I had fun.

Prey Stream Archives

That being said, we now have to pick some new games! I actually already have, for once, and can let you know right in this post what we’ll be playing tonight! It’s a miracle of modern science.

Tonight we’ll be starting off by playing That Which Gives Chase, a small horror adventure into the snows of the north with a team of dogs on my sled and shit. Honestly seems like a neat little experience. And since that’s relatively short, we’ll follow it up by starting up with THE WARRIORLOCK. There’s a lot of WRITING in this game, and I’m really unsure of the quality, but we’ll get through it all the same.

And, what would a new post be without me updating you all on the cool progress my PeerTube instance is making in transferring my entire archive from YouTube to a nice, locally-sourced video hosting platform. It’s uh, it’s making progress. We’re going backwards through time and have made it into 2017 now with some of the final drunk streams. It’s safe to say things are going well.

That’s it for now, thanks as always and see you at the streams or in the comments or just, you know, wherever you happen to see me.

Turok came, Turok saw, Turok went

I’m sure that’s exactly how I should phrase the title of this post.

Ignoring that, we’ve just finished our short play through of some supposed dinosaur hunting in the PC port of the first Turok game. For some unknown reason I didn’t start with the last game or somewhere in the middle of the series, and I actually beat it pretty handily, but man it never gives you a fucking break on the ammo. You just run out constantly.

Turok Stream Archives

It’s a fun game, but man if the weird reverb issue didn’t kind of make that last part feel like I had to rush. Oh well, fun was still had.

Now, on to more future things. Next game we’ll be playing is Prey (2017), which I hear is a great game. It’ll take us a bit to get through, but after that I think I’m going to start taking a trip to lesser known games which will obviously be a thing. I’m expecting game quality to be all over the place, but who knows what we’ll dig up.

On the stream archive side, I’m still pushing through transferring everything from YouTube to PeerTube. It’s going well, but it does take a bit of time for each video to go up. Managed to get back through Layers of Fear, and F.E.A.R. 2 is going up currently. It might speed back up once we get through the post-children era of streams, so that’ll be nice.

Anyway, we’re keeping up with streaming on a vague schedule, so that’s nice.

Thanks as always.

There is nothing to F.E.A.R. because F.E.A.R. is all done

As is tradition, we finished streaming F.E.A.R. so now I’m posting about it. We even showed off a little bit of the fan-run multiplayer servers for the original game. So between this game finishing, and the earlier runs of F.E.A.R. 2 and F.3.A.R., we’re done. We’ve completed the franchise. There’s no more F.E.A.R. to be played. It’s nice to close out a franchise, even if we did play it backwards. Nothing wrong with that, though. We saved the best for last. Except for the part where we played the expansions that are just kind of mediocre beyond a few of the new weapons being pretty neat. Love me my brick laser.

So if you’re looking forward to checking out the F.E.A.R. streams, just head on over to the category page and start spinning them up. They’re all on PeerTube, so you get to enjoy our locally hosted, homegrown streams there.

Anyway, we’re playing Turok now. It’s going to be a chill time for another weekend or so of that before we pick the next proper game.

And speaking of PeerTube, I’ve got the live streaming working so if you’re wanting to just get my streams direct from the source, that’s now an option. I still need to get it properly embedded into the site here so it’s easier for you all to choose to watch it that way if you want. Basically I have to write a WordPress plugin to allow for embedding and swapping between the Twitch and PeerTube streams, and then maybe I’ll work on getting another nice chat embed going.

Lots of stuff to work on as always, but we’ll eventually get to the point where this site is totally cool again. Wait, no. It’s totally cool now. Yeah, that’s it.

Thanks as always everyone.

PeerTube? What’s that?

Basically, I’ve done another very kuoushi thing and created my own PeerTube instance, which basically functions as a self-hosted YouTube. This means I’m going to go back through the archive and get all of it on there so I can fully ignore YouTube. Of course that means I’m using my own bandwidth to host videos with whatever downtimes come with that, but that’s okay. I like being the equivalent of an internet hermit up in the backwoods just doing my own thing. Plus, PeerTube allows…live streaming? I’m still getting that working, but apparently I can potentially even cut out Twitch. Not that I should, but it’ll be nice to offer an alternative stream for people who don’t want to deal with the ads or anything.

As far as what is currently on PeerTube? I’ve put the current set of F.E.A.R. streams on there if you’d like to test that out. It’s not as feature-rich as YouTube, but I can offer chapters for highlights, plus full resolution/240p transcodes in case someone doesn’t have decent enough bandwidth to stream well. It honestly seems like a really good solution for my little site so I don’t have to rely on external services.

Oh, and another fun feature of PeerTube, it’s federated with ActivityPub. Got yourself a Mastodon account? Go ahead and follow @kuoushi_stream to get updates whenever streams go live or new archives get published. You can, of course, just follow @kuoushi for that as well, but now you’ve got another way to follow me. All sorts of options to follow the cool kuoushi.

And a quick note on streams? We’re going to likely finish up F.E.A.R.: Perseus Mandate next week and start a new game. What game will it be? Who knows. I certainly won’t post about it until I post about being done with F.E.A.R. because I suck at promoting myself. Maybe that’s normal.

That’s all for now, thanks as always.